The secret to being miserable is to have
the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.— George Bernard Shaw
We are all self-focused. Thoughts related to the self — how I feel, why I feel that way, what other people think of me — are compelling. When this tendency is combined with the recursive structure of consciousness, Ruminative Self-Focus [RSF] emerges. RSF is the pathogen responsible for clinical depression, generalized anxiety, and chronic anger. Paradoxically, as compelling as it is, self-awareness is aversive.
A Tragic Irony
Bad things [for example, physical pain, the feeling of failure] inspires a search for a solution. We tend to focus on such things so we can get some control over the problem. Sadly, well-intended problem-solving can do more harm than good when your attention strays from disciplined problem-solving to self-focused rumination [aka RSF], consider: "The fact that I am alone on Saturday night means X about me," or "What if I look nervous during my speech and they think Y about me."
RSF looks like problem-solving, but it is an imposter. Instead of leading to a solution, the rumination cycles through the same sequence of thoughts and reactions to those thoughts again and again, without coming to a conclusion or promoting problem resolution. RSF is demoralizing and uses up the dear cognitive resources that are needed to initiate effective action. It is RSF that causes otherwise competent individuals to repeatedly under-perform in life domains where they judge themselves to be a failure.
The unintended consequences of trying to fix yourself
In most cases problem solving is a rational process characterized by dispassionate analysis of cause and effect. For example, when a piece of equipment malfunctions, you, the problem-solver, will have to search for the defective component so you can fix or replace it. However, when you search for a defective component within yourself, it is hard to resist the temptation to switch from effective problem-solving to destructive self-focused rumination.
- Julius Kuhl’s research on conditioned helplessness shows that when people believe they have failed, their focus shifts from figuring out how to be successful (problem-solving) to perseverative thoughts about themselves, "why I failed, what it means about me that I failed, etc." This turns out to be a self-sabotaging strategy because the rumination consumes cognitive resources that are then unavailable for problem solving. Kuhl found that conditioned helplessness appears to be maintained by the reciprocal relationship between failure and ruminative self-focus: Failure leads to ruminative self-focus and ruminative self-focus impairs performance, which increases the likelihood of failure.
- Recent research on depression and the quality of social performance shows that negative mood leads to self-focused rumination, and self-focused rumination leads to negative mood. Moreover, the RSF, and the depressed emotional state it evokes, is found to impair subjects’ social problem-solving abilities and to decrease their self-efficacy regarding their social skills, both of which impair social performance. Poor social performance, in turn, may result in loneliness and other negative consequences, which set up higher level recursive structures.
- Research on clinical depression shows that both pain and failure automatically elicit Ruminative Self-Focus [RSF]. The shift from the associative perspective of direct experience to the dissociative perspective of ruminating on the abstract meaning and causes of the pain produces the recursive sequence of internal states and external events that maintains and often exacerbates the disorder.
Some individuals are burdened with a harsh critic. While it is important to learn from pain and failure, harsh criticism can weaken the creature, and hence be counterproductive. You would not beat a puppy mercilessly for a paper-training accident, because it would obviously do more harm than good. Likewise, overly harsh, negative, insulting, or abusive perspectives toward yourself are pathogenic and no more valid than the perspective of a patient teacher, who wants you to succeed, and has unconditional positive regard for you.
Happiness as Escape from RSF
When I ask clients what they want out of life, or what they hope would happen if they could become free of their Mood Disorder, they often tell me they "want to be happy." There has been a lot of research on happiness and paths to achieve it. Perhaps the most sophisticated view of this topic suggests that happiness is freedom from RSF.
For individuals who become emotionally attached to outcomes, or who are judgmental toward themselves, any attempt to improve the self comes with the tendency to evaluate and criticize the self thereby initiating a recursive trap.
The key to exploring the cause-and-effect principles that determine your reactions to the things that happen is to be open to the truth without falling into RSF. You can do this if you maintain the perspective of the dispassionate observer seeking to understand the cause-and-effect relationships that determine your reactions to the things that happen, rather than the self-critical observer with an ax to grind.
The Karma of Self-Focus
You don’t pay for your sins in the next life, you pay for them during this one. The consequence of focusing on yourself is that the more you do it the easier it gets. Eventually, the self-focus becomes the default. Sloppy thinking is a consequence of practicing sloppy thinking. Likewise, defecting from the path of greatest advantage becomes easier the more you do it.